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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Retro gaming',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/08/06.jpg" alt="A view of the bike path from across the street" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			The discussion assignment asks &quot;How do you know your position is the correct one?&quot;.
			This question implies two things.
			First of all, it implies that I think I do know the position I take to be correct.
			That would be a pretty conceited view for me to take.
			We&apos;re all entitled to our own views.
			Who am I to claim I know mine to be the &quot;one correct view&quot;?
			Seriously.
			Second, it inplies that there even <strong>*exists*</strong> a &quot;one correct view&quot;.
			I have <strong>*always*</strong> taken the position that when it comes to philosophical views, there is no right answer.
			We humans try to put meaning where it doesn&apos;t actually exist.
			My response cannot possibly be right, as there is no right answer to the question.
			Likewise, my response can&apos;t be wrong because there&apos;s no wrong answer either.
		</p>
		<p>
			Anyway, back to the rest of the question at hand ...
		</p>
		<p>
			Voltaire says that if a god didn&apos;t already exist, it&apos;d&apos;ve been necessary for humanity to invent one.
			If you&apos;ve been reading any of my posts, it should go without saying that I disagree with this sentiment.
			First of all, it claims that there is in fact a god.
			I believe no such thing.
			Religion is a tool to control the masses.
			As for inventing one, I view religion, especially organised religion, as highly toxic.
			It prevents people from seeing the truth of our reality.
			We&apos;ve already invented a multitude of gods, but we&apos;d be better off without all of them.
			It doesn&apos;t matter exactly what Voltaire meant by it, no interpretation of us needing to invent a god is something I can agree with.
		</p>
		<p>
			But what exactly <strong>*did*</strong> Voltaire mean when he said that if there hadn&apos;t already been a god, inventing one would be necessary?
			This is actually still being debated (The Basics Of Philosophy, n.d.).
			Personally, I think it means that Voltaire thinks we need a god.
			Perhaps he thinks we&apos;d be immoral without one.
			Or maybe he thinks we&apos;d fall into despair without one, unable to cope with thoughts of the endless void that await us all after death.
			Personally, I disagree on both fronts.
			I&apos;ve done just fine coping with thoughts of the void.
			Modern religion basically teaches us that we&apos;re expendable to our creator though, and that we&apos;re basically going to be thrown out like garbage if we don&apos;t comply to our creator&apos;s demands, including certain toxic demands, such as the homophobic ones.
			I&apos;ve already accepted that my parents don&apos;t care.
			They like the idea of me, just not the actual me.
			But to be considered expendable by someone with infinite time and energy to give?
			That just hurts.
			And to have to be subjugated for an eternity to unfair and arbitrary rules?
			No thanks.
			As for immorality, I&apos;m more ethical than most people I know, and some of the least ethical people I know are very religious.
			Religion may act as a framework for enforcing morality, but it certainly isn&apos;t where morality comes from.
			A lot of blood has been needlessly shed in the name of religion as well.
			The immoral will find a way, with or without religion, to behave immorally.
			And the moral will behave morally with or without religion.
		</p>
		<p>
			(Remember, the discussion assignment said to make two initial posts.
			My discussion on which philosopher was most interesting is the next main post down.)
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h2>References:</h2>
			<p>
				The Basics Of Philosophy. (n.d.). Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) &gt; By Individual Philosopher &gt; Philosophy. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_voltaire.html"><code>https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_voltaire.html</code></a>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			In choosing which philosopher I found most interesting, I suppose I went about it by ruling one of the philosophers out.
			First, I read up on Wang Yangming.
			Instead of presenting his philosophy in understandable terms, the reading material used a bunch of bizarre words that seem to have been defined specifically to handle this type of philosophy.
			It made the reading very laboured to read and difficult to absorb.
			When you have to invent new words to describe your philosophy because you can&apos;t explain it using existing words, I think it show you haven&apos;t actually thought through your philosophy very well.
			Your new words need to be defined in terms of existing words for them to be of any value, so if your new words have any value, you could have used the understandable words from the existing dictionary instead.
			And I don&apos;t find half-baked philosophy to be interesting.
			Alternatively, perhaps these words are just Chinese word that didn&apos;t get translated, in which case the fault for the difficult reading lies with the translator.
			In either case, as presented, the ideas seem partly formed.
			Additionally, these writings claim human nature to be inherently good, but that selfishness gets in the way of realising true human nature.
			This seems self-contradictory though.
			Selfishness is a huge part of human nature.
			We see it all around us every day.
			If selfishness is really a problem, and I&apos;d argue that it most definitely is, it&apos;s a problem that shows that human nature really isn&apos;t all that great.
			We humans kind of suck.
			He also seems to think there&apos;s a way to make perfect decisions based on very little information.
			He wants us to use &quot;innate knowledge&quot;, which is basically just beliefs that you have without learning the actual details of the situation.
			However, I&apos;m of the opinion that the more information you have (and understand), the better.
			I agonise over important decisions.
			I research.
			I reproduce missing information logically from existing information.
			When I have little information, I have almost nothing to work with.
			Yangming focuses on intuition, and intuition can be great for picking up on problems and finding a start to a solution.
			I find that those that depend nearly completely on intuition tend to arrive at solutions that either need to be fixed several times later or solutions that cause undue hardship for people around them.
			Another problem he has is that he thinks people find the right solution with higher change based on their level of conviction.
			Confidence is key.
			However, I find that people who are over-confident are often wrong.
			They&apos;re over-confident because they&apos;re not taking into account the complexity of the situation, and when shown they&apos;re wrong, these people usually deny the evidence.
		</p>
		<p>
			The African breakdown of what they think personalities are made of was mildly interesting.
			The section on finding a new type of democracy was a good read, though it didn&apos;t explain how African philosophy works so much as showcase a particular ethical problem to which the solution hasn&apos;t been found yet.
			The rest of the reading material on African philosophy seemed to be a history lesson and a listing of various contributions to African philosophy.
			I don&apos;t feel like I learned much about actual African philosophy.
			I also didn&apos;t really learn much from the text about Wiredu himself.
		</p>
		<p>
			Right off the bat, Voltaire caught my attention due to being an advocate of social reform.
			Social reform is something badly needed in my own country, the United States.
			His heavy use of satire is also something I will enjoy if we get deeper into his works.
			His attempt to reason that there must be a god because one is needed for the universe to be based on reason seems a bit illogical.
			It assumes the universe <strong>*is*</strong> based on reason, but what evidence is there for that?
			We humans try to impose reason on the things in our lives, but nature is pretty chaotic, not to even mention the bizarre things that lie outside our atmosphere.
			I&apos;d have to say Voltaire was the most interesting to me.
		</p>
		<p>
			(Remember, the discussion assignment said to make two initial posts.
			My discussion on the inventing of a god is the next main post up.)
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h2>References:</h2>
			<p>
				The Basics Of Philosophy. (n.d.). Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) > By Individual Philosopher > Philosophy. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_voltaire.html"><code>https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_voltaire.html</code></a>
			</p>
			<p>
				Kim, Y. (n.d.). Wang Yangming (Wang Shou-Jen) | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/wangyang/"><code>https://www.iep.utm.edu/wangyang/</code></a>
			</p>
			<p>
				Wiredu, K. (n.d.). A Companion to African Philosophy. Retrieved from <a href="https://zelalemkibret.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/blackwell-companion-to-african-philosophy.pdf"><code>https://zelalemkibret.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/blackwell-companion-to-african-philosophy.pdf</code></a>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Minetest</h2>
	<p>
		Although I&apos;d thought I&apos;d come up with all the ideas I needed for generation zero alchemy, I&apos;ve been having trouble actually putting the <code>alchemic_classic</code> mod together.
		The problem is that I&apos;ve been second-guessing myself.
		I got the one-item recipe results completed, and I got the iron plus coal recipe completed.
		I&apos;m having trouble with the sapling plus one other item recipes though.
		I&apos;m questioning whether my idea for &quot;attentive trees&quot; that can be melted into some sort of &quot;attentive ingots&quot; is any good.
		As for the coal and apple saplings, I wanted to merge them into charwood apple saplings.
		The trees would basically be made of burnt wood, and permanent flames could be lit on them like coal blocks.
		At some point, I decided the leaves shouldn&apos;t be black either, but flame-coloured.
		And light-emitting.
		Honestly, I think it&apos;d come out awesome.
		The problem is that I&apos;d have about the same idea for <strong>*every*</strong> coal-plus-sapling recipe, not just apple saplings.
		In what way can I, in a sixteen by sixteen pixel space, differentiate the five different wood types crafted from what are basically burnt trees?
		I needed to come up with something apple-sapling-specific.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve got a new plan of action though now.
		I had a flash of inspiration today, and realised I wasn&apos;t milking my retro Minetest version plan for all it&apos;s worth.
		My charwood tree idea is based on a fairly recent development in Minetest Game history: burning coal blocks.
		This is the only obvious choice, given that coal blocks are the only purely-coal, placeable nodes.
		Coal lumps aren&apos;t nodes and can&apos;t be placed, meaning they therefore have no properties in their base form.
		But coal wasn&apos;t always so developed.
		Coal&apos;s character has changed quite a bit over the years, and I can capture several of its themes across alchemic recipes.
		I mean, coal gives light in the form of torches, fire in the form of coal blocks, and maybe something rubbery in the form of brake rails.
		It&apos;s a versatile element in the Minetest world.
		In the beginning, I think coal could only be used to craft torches.
		My first recipes with it should reflect that.
		Torches don&apos;t burn away, so the first tree made with coal shouldn&apos;t burn either.
		Yet, the leaves probably should still be fiery.
		I&apos;ll probably end up throwing out all the work I&apos;ve done so (in <code>alchemic_classic</code>, but not <code>alchemy</code> and <code>minestats</code>) and starting from scratch with the old game in mind.
	</p>
	<p>
		The plan is pretty simple.
		I&apos;ll go back and both play one and develop on old Minetest Game versions.
		The engine&apos;s $a[API] has undergone huge additions, so I&apos;ll use old versions of the engine to match.
		That&apos;ll limit what I can do, keeping me focused on what was actually available to old Minetest developers.
		Newer elemental combinations will have access to the newer features.
		If my estimations are anywhere near correct, way more than half of the combinations will be built using a very modern Minetest engine version, so it&apos;s not like alchemy will be a legacy thing.
		It&apos;ll still be interesting, I just want ancient alchemy to be a thing too.
	</p>
	<p>
		I tried compiling the version of the engine that corresponds to the oldest available semi-stable Minetest Game version.
		No dice.
		I&apos;m not sure what isn&apos;t working, but I didn&apos;t want to waste too much time with that if I could at all avoid it.
		Instead, I tried compiling the stable 0.4.0 engine.
		That worked just fine.
		Oddly enough, there is no stable 0.4.0 version of Minetest Game though, only Minetest.
		I&apos;ll use the oldest available semi-stable version as originally planned instead.
	</p>
	<p>
		The first step was to try adding <code>minestats</code> to the old game.
		With any luck, it&apos;d run as-is.
		I mean, <code>minestats</code> doesn&apos;t do anything fancy, does it?
		Well, actually, it turns out it does.
		It uses &quot;mod storage&quot;, a fairly recent addition to the game, to store its data.
		Before I can develop, I&apos;ll have to either dumb down <code>minestats</code> or re-invent mod storage.
		I don&apos;t want to dumb down <code>minestats</code>.
		Forking <code>minestats</code> and creating a &quot;stupid version&quot; is just asking for trouble.
		As I improve <code>minestats</code>, if I develop using the newer version, I&apos;ll need to keep re-dumbing-down <code>minestats</code> to use it in my test world.
		If I develop using the dumbed-down version, I&apos;ll need to keep tuning it up, and if I forget to do that each time, I could lose features I develop during this period.
		Re-inventing mod storage is the way to go, though I&apos;m not sure what tools I have available to implement it in.
		It&apos;s a project for another day though.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
